Mama Amazonica

Publication Date : 28 Sep 2017

ISBN: 9781780372945

Pages: 65
Size :216 x 138mm
Rights: World

Poetry Book Society Choice

Mama Amazonica is set in a psychiatric ward and in the Amazon rainforest, an asylum for animals on the brink of extinction. It reveals the story of Pascale Petit’s mentally ill mother and the consequences of abuse. The mother transforms into a giant Victoria amazonica waterlily, and a bestiary of untameable creatures – a jaguar girl, a wolverine, a hummingbird – as she marries her rapist and gives birth to his children. From heartbreaking trauma, there emerge luxuriant and tender portraits of a woman battling for survival, in poems that echo the plight of others under duress, and of our companion species. Petit does not flinch from the violence but offers hope by celebrating the beauty of the wild, whether in the mind or the natural world.

Mama Amazonica is Pascale Petit's seventh collection, and her first from Bloodaxe. Four of Pascale Petit's previous six collections have been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

'Since 2001, when Pascale Petit published The Zoo Father, her greatest, most singular achievement has been to tackle difficult subject matter head-on while simultaneously distancing herself from it through the use of exotic metaphor. The distancing is crucial. It lies at the core of her method, and has enabled her to procure poems of a raw, almost ecstatic, beauty and, to paraphrase Ruth Padel, to write the unwritable. In this, her seventh extraordinary collection, possibly her most integrated book so far, this sort of elongated lens is much in evidence... This is a major literary feat, and this a brilliant sequence of poems. It burns in its own supranatural light.' – Tim Liardet & Vona Groarke, PBS Bulletin.

'Mama Amazonica is an example of how the transformative power of art can buffer pain and trauma. Petit renews, rebirths and reconstructs her relationship with her mother into something ethereal, shimmering and ultimately breathtakingly beautiful and wild.’ – Flavia, Good Reads

‘In likening her [mother] to various rainforest creatures, Petit has carved for the reader a portrait of a woman who is utterly changeable – at once, impossible to love and yet also impossible not to. She is the Victoria Amazonica, the jaguar and the caiman, amongst the many other animal-identities she assumes throughout the collection. Each creature or plant shows a little more of what it must have been like to live with her… A triumphant collection inspired by her life and her trips to the Amazonian rainforest, Pascale Petit’s Mama Amazonica is thoroughly recommended.’ – Literature Works

Pascale Petit reads 'My Wolverine'

Pascale Petit reads her poem ‘My Wolverine’ from Mama Amazonica. This poem was first published in Ploughshares (USA) and also appears in Hwaet! 20 Years of Ledbury Poetry Festival (Bloodaxe Books, July 2016). Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed her reading ‘My Wolverine’ in London in January 2015. To read the poem, click on VIEW EXTRACT below.

Related Reviews

'Pascale Petit’s Fauverie is astonishing, one of those books that breaks new ground in how to approach writing about the unwritable.' – Ruth Padel, London Review Bookshop Books of the Year

'The voice of Fauverie speaks both bravely and with bravura from the heart of its material. There is conspiracy in these poems and great beauty. They venture into the cellar of the past, summon up memory and conjure it into a firework display of metaphoric brilliance.' – Helen Dunmore, Chair of Judges, 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize

'Pascale’s poems are as fresh as paint, and make you look all over again at Frida and her brilliant and tragic life.' – Jackie Kay, The Observer (Books of the Year), on What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo

'This is a wonderful and red-raw collection that captures pain, love and loss.' – The Independent, on The Zoo Father

'A brave and unsettling collection. These are psychological explorations of relationships and power struggles that take risks. – Robyn Bolam, Poetry Review, on The Huntress